Claiming Her SEAL(17)

He cocked his head and let a slow, brutal smile spread across his face.  "Yep. How you doing with it? Because it gets worse. I can see that  million dollar question running through your mind. How many people could  it have been? Four? Five?"

He let that sink in and waltzed a step closer with as much calculated  menace as he could muster. She retreated a step, nearly stumbling.

"Sixty-eight, Emma," he said. "I killed sixty-eight people in cold blood. Still want to get down and dirty with me?"

Her lips pressed together and she shook her head. "That was in the line  of duty, Dex. Wasn't it? You can't think of it like that."

Her voice wavered as if seeking validation for something she wasn't quite convinced of yet.

"Oh, but it's not an opinion. I'm an efficient killing machine, Emma,"  he corrected silkily. "I trained to become one. I craved perfection at  my chosen skillset and I earned it. I can hit any man you put in front  of me from nearly any distance. Spill every drop of blood and watch it  soak into the desert floor. Without regret."

That was the kicker. The thing that kept him from ever earning true redemption. He'd killed people, and he wasn't sorry.

"Go, Emma," he commanded softly, and she tensed, poised to obey his  command. But she didn't flee, not yet, held in place by something he  couldn't fathom. "Don't look back. Most little girls worry about the  monsters under the bed. I'm saving you from having one in your bed."

And then she whirled and stumbled away, but not before he saw the  devastation and revulsion he'd been aiming for finally surface in her  gaze.

Better the light go out in her vivid blue eyes than in her soul. He had enough lives on his conscience.





Emma didn't get very far before she fell to the sand, knees digging in painfully.

She welcomed the bite of the tiny granules against her skin because it  kept her centered. Otherwise, she'd spiral off into oblivion. The  fragile grip she had on her sanity might let go at any second.

Her torso heaved as she fought to drag oxygen into her lungs. She  couldn't get a deep enough breath, and her head spun with a hundred  different conflicting images.

Most of them were horrific.

Dex was …  well, she didn't know what he was. The revelations of the past  few minutes had rocked her, flipped her upside down and back again. And  everything inside ached.

Once again, she'd proven to be a horrible judge of a man. She'd let her  guard down, let Dex into her vulnerable insides, and he was not the  stable, guiding force she'd thought he was.

He was a man capable of taking human life with relish. A million times  worse than Chris. At least Chris has only attempted murder and failed  because he'd misjudged Emma's desire to escape her watery grave. She'd  kicked her way out of that car because she didn't want to die. And had  latched onto the promise of what Dex had to offer because she wanted to  live.

A sob bubbled up in her throat, and she choked it back. Hadn't she cried  enough tears over a man? Not one of them was worth it. All she hoped  for in life was stability. She'd sought that out through Chris, assuming  marriage was the path to it. After the number he'd done on her, this  trip to the Caribbean represented yet another shot at finding her  center.

Looked like the problem was Emma. She was too unbalanced to be stable. Obviously.

Emma fell heavily into the sand and rolled into a ball. It had never  occurred to her that the darkness she sometimes sensed in Dex had its  roots in evil that he'd willingly participated in. It wasn't like she  was naïve about things that people had to deal with from their pasts,  but she'd expected to learn he'd been the victim of abuse once upon a  time, or had his heart broken through an untimely death. She'd been  foolish and oh so smug about being able to handle his secrets. Had tried  to push him into sleeping with her because of her own selfish needs.         

     



 

At least Dex-or whatever his name was-had the presence of mind to stop her from making a huge mistake.

Dex was a killer. A stone-cold killer. And totally unapologetic about it.

But as she lay there staring so hard at the blue sky that her vision  blurred, the kind and sensitive part of Dex filtered through, gradually  replacing the image he'd painted of himself as a cold-blooded killer.

He was a man capable of holding her hand as she swam. He'd  listened-without interruption-as she spilled her guts about how Chris  had upended her entire life. He'd saved her from being assaulted.

He'd even saved her from herself because she wouldn't listen to his  warnings. All of his actions since she'd met him had pointed to a man  whose first instinct was to protect. His second was to help. He did not  ever seek to destroy. Or to perpetuate evil. Dex was not a man who could  be rightly called a serial killer.

Yet someone incredibly insensitive had foisted that identity onto him.  And he'd internalized it, then started to believe he was a bad person.

The sharp ache in her chest spiked down into her stomach, spreading its  misery to encompass her whole body, and she couldn't breathe through the  agony. She hurt for the tortured man who would rather send a woman  away, denying his own needs, before he'd take advantage of what she was  so clearly offering.

Walking away from him had been a mistake.

She sat up. He'd confessed his secrets, exactly as she'd pushed him to,  and instead of holding him tight through his nightmares-like he'd done  for her-she'd run away.

God, how selfish could she be? He'd needed her, and she'd let him push  her away because she couldn't process her own fears that he was like  Chris. That she'd misjudged again.

Dex was nothing like Chris. Nor was he anything like the man he  pretended to be-to everyone, including himself. And he needed Emma to  prove it to him.

Mission laid out for her, she walked back to the resort with purpose,  took a shower and did her hair and makeup, then slid into a flirty  sundress that she'd bought specifically to wear to someplace thick with  men. She'd hoped it might gain the attention of a cute guy across the  room, who might be interested in buying her a drink. Then he'd slide  onto the next barstool and make her laugh as they talked about their  mutual love of the Red Sox.

The man she was ultimately wearing it for probably wouldn't even notice  it, but the dress made her feel like a woman who could handle anything,  and that's what she needed. She had no business claiming to be strong if  she couldn't right the wrong she'd committed by failing to see through  Dex's ploy.

He'd deliberately scared her away. And she was terribly ashamed that it had worked-but she was going to fix it. Somehow.

By the time she finished dressing for battle, dusk had fallen. She had  no idea how to find Dex. But he had a habit of appearing out of the thin  air, and she hoped that if she walked in the direction of the village  where he lived, which he'd said was located on the other side of the  island, that trend would continue.

Rachel waved good-bye with a saucy grin. "I won't bother to wait up."

Barefoot, Emma set off purposefully, but the closer she got to the  little inlet where she'd first gone in the water-where Dex had first  kissed her-the less sure her steps became.

What if she'd completely blown this situation out of proportion? Dex  hadn't seemed particularly tortured when he'd spelled out his sins. But  she'd gotten the distinct impression that he'd deliberately coated his  comments with a layer of harshness so she'd leave.

And she had. But regretted it. He hadn't fled in the middle of her  crisis. For all her claims of being strong enough to handle a man like  Dex, she'd folded under the pressure nearly instantaneously. Maybe she  wasn't actually enough for him.

But there was more to his story. She could feel it. Dex still had vast,  uncharted reaches under his skin and if she hoped to discover his  depths, uncover them, start to know them and eventually help him heal,  she needed to wade out into the water.

The sun started to set in a spectacular burst of reds and oranges. A few  small bungalows came into sight and then a few more. The village where  Dex must live was indeed a tiny dot on the map, and after hearing Dex's  revelation about his past, she wondered what secrets his friends must  have for them to all have hidden away from civilization. There was a  deliberateness to their choices that said they'd banded together and  intended to keep the world out.

A young woman holding the hand of a little boy emerged from the bungalow  closest to Emma, and with a few words to the boy to go play in the  sand, she began unpinning laundry from a line stretching from her house  to a tree in her backyard.         

     



 

"Excuse me," Emma called. "I'm looking for Dex … "

She'd been about to supply his last name, which she didn't know. Idiot.

All her second thoughts came roaring back. She'd walked all this way to  comfort a man who had no interest in comfort or he'd have presented his  secrets in a far different way. The lessons to be learned here were  escaping her, and she should just go back to her room. Dex had warned  her away time and time again, then had to resort to scaring her away.  Was she never going to learn?